The great paradox of the capital-T “Tragedy” in art and literature is that the end is always the most important and the least interesting part of the experience. On the one hand, any classical Tragedy needs its painful but inevitable conclusion to cement its story’s themes and provide the emotional catharsis that the audience has been looking for since the start of the tale. Despite that, though, the very nature of a Tragedy demands that the ending lack surprise or subversion, as the power of the characters’ doomed journeys is due in part to the audience being on the same page as the storyteller every step of the way. To muddy that symbiotic relationship with cheap twists or misguided attempts at softening the blow is to betray the whole point of the genre. (If you’d like a perfectly unexpected companion piece to pair with this week’s viewing of NieR:Automata, go check out Will Ferrell’s lovely tragicomedy from 2006, Stranger Than Fiction).

This is why Shakespeare spends so much time on Hamlet’s struggle with his own conflicted nature instead of drawing things out with Claudius in Act V; it’s why we have spent half a century falling into a trance as we share the murky and uncertain limbo of Waiting for Godot with Didi and Gogo, and why that play would be ruined if we ever let those two off the hook to either run off together or die; it’s why the Cohen Bros. and Cormac McCarthy could kill Llewellyn off-screen in No Country for Old Men and let its leading monster simply hobble off into the sunset. You can’t simply guess that the characters in a Tragedy are doomed from the start. The ending has to worm its way under your skin and into your bones, so much so that, by the time the curtains close and the credits roll, all you can possibly do in response is nod your head in resignation and say to yourself, “Yes, of course. It couldn’t have gone any differently. It wouldn’t have been right.”

As I’ve said from the start of these NieR reviews, despite how much I have enjoyed and respected this attempt to adapt my favorite video game of all time into a fundamentally different medium, it was never going to be able to capture what makes NieR:Automata so great in the first place. I’ve long since accepted that fact, but it has been interesting to watch the story unfold in weekly animated episodes regardless, because it has made the strengths of the game so much more vivid in retrospect. 9S and A2s final ascent to their ultimate fate is lovingly crafted and chock-full of all the drama, action, and spectacle that you’d expect. I even think that the anime still has a leg up on the game in some respects, like how the connection between A2 and the villainous Red Girls feels much stronger with the Pearl Harbor Descent story having been integrated into the story proper.

Still, though, this anime loses out on the single aspect of the game that makes it work so goddamned brilliantly as a classically Tragic work of literature shaped into digital form: When 9S is losing his mind and becoming determined to slaughter every last Android and Machine left standing, including A2, it’s you that is pressing the buttons and pushing the thumbsticks to make it happen. When the game finally pits our remaining “heroes” against each other in one last duel to the death, it’s up to you to decide which character to side with. Hell, even when you inevitably reload your save to choose the other option and see how it affects the ending, NieR:Automata still manages to incorporate that act of twisting time and manipulating the narrative into its larger web of ludonarrative culpability. Then there’s the final Ending E of the game, which…well, we’ll see what the show does with that when we get there.

The point is that, if you simply examine NieR:Automata as a collection of characters, scenes, and lines of dialogue, it becomes a well-executed if fairly pedestrian science-fiction melodrama. The pacing is a little wonky due to the cuts needed to fit the story into episodic format; the character beats remain largely predictable; some of the bigger pieces of plot and narrative function stand out as being undercooked, like the handling of Devola and Popola, or the bloviating of the Red Girls. It’s only when all of those different pieces come together as a single tapestry, with the interactive mechanics of the player’s involvement serving as the thread that binds each disparate part together, that NieR:Automata transforms into one of the great capital-T tragedies of the 21st century.

Imagine, if you will, Hamlet standing in that looming hall, contemplating whether it is better “to be, or not to be.” For the last four hundred years, readers and viewers have had to sit silent and observant from the other side of the fourth wall, as helpless to act or to change the characters’ destinies as any of the poor fools trapped within the bounds of the stage. What the anime of NieR:Automata has not been able to capture in these critical final moments is the way that the game makes its players complicit in the tragedy in a way that they could never be if they simply sat down and passively watched these events unfold from behind the safe veil of the fourth wall. It would be like if we were each individually guided on stage to place our hands on Hamlet’s shoulder and push him gently onwards to his final destination. It doesn’t change anything about what happens in the story, but it changes everything about what it means to us.

As another set of curtains stands to close on another tale of fruitless revenge and needless death, NieR:Automata Ver1.1a remains a good summary of a story that cannot really be told outside of the medium for which it was created. It was doomed from the start. I suppose that makes it a worthwhile Tragedy in its own right, after all. A great paradox, indeed.

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NieR:Automata Ver 1.1a Season 2 is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.